New Techism Site is Online

The Techism Team is very proud to present the new Techism Website: http://www.techism.de.

Techism is a calendar for non-commercial IT events and community meetings in the Munich area. We collect dates ourself and encourage other users and user groups to publish related events.

The new website is based on some nice technologies:

• It runs on Google's App Engine cloud platform and uses the non-relational data store as well as memcache.
• The application is written in Python and uses the Django web framework. As it runs on App Engine we use the Django-nonrel port.
• The frontend uses some new HTML5 and CSS3 features like rounded corners and nice gradients. The page looks great on desktop and mobile devices. There is also a touch icon so one can bookmark the page on the iPhone or Android phone.
• Google Maps is used to display the location of an event. Both, static and dynamic (JavaScript) maps are used, depending on the display size.

I hate web applications that force the user to register and to choose another password, especially if they ask stupid security questions for password reset. For Techism we instead use OpenID to authenticate users. Authenticated users are allowed to publish events without review and they are also able to edit their own events.

We use several techniques to publish the events into the world. First, we provide an Atom and RSS feed that publishes newly added events. Second, there is an iCalendar feed containing all upcoming events that can be added to your personal calendar. Last not least, all events are tweeted three days in advance to the Techism Twitter accout.

Of course the whole software is Open Source, available under the Apache License, version 2.0. The code is hosted at Github.